


16 pages

by pocoloki



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Fluff, Love Letters, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Softe Boys Being Softe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-27 21:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20767355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocoloki/pseuds/pocoloki
Summary: Victor Katsuki-Nikiforov deserves a proper, romantic love letter, and there's only one person in the world who is qualified to write it for him.(or, Yuuri is Extra and loves his husband a whole awful lot.)For WeWriteVictuuri's weekly prompt: "You did all of this for me?"





	16 pages

Watching movies with Victor is always entertaining. 

More specifically, watching_ Victor _watching movies is entertaining. It’s funny in a way—and in others, not funny at all—that someone Yuuri had once considered so perfectly cool and inscrutable is now such an open book, his heart on his sleeve, his emotional reactions to the film playing out on his face as plain as day.

If it’s a horror movie they’re watching, he’ll cling to Yuuri’s arm and bury his face in his shoulder during particularly gruesome scenes. If it’s a tragedy, he’ll squeeze Yuuri’s hand until it feels like it’s going to break, tears streaming silently down his cheeks. If it’s a comedy, he will inevitably treat Yuuri to one of his favourite sounds, Victor’s uncontrollable belly-laugh. Whatever the genre, his reactions never fail to provide as much—if not more—enjoyment to Yuuri as the actual film itself.

Tonight, they’re watching a romance. A period piece set in regency England, all petticoats and sharp-witted heroines and the charming, sensitive aristocrats who catch their eyes. This is Yuuri’s favourite kind of movie to watch Victor watching. The man is a giant sap, top to bottom, and a good old fashioned romance will typically have him melted into a puddle of goo by the top of the second act. 

Tonight’s film is no exception. He’s enraptured from the word go, leaning in starry-eyed from the first conversation between the romantic leads. Yuuri doesn’t think he sees his husband breathe once during the sexually-charged ballroom scene. He finds his eyes more often on Victor than the screen itself, his own heart swelling with love for the spellbound man beside him.

Victor’s eyes shine as he watches the heroine sign and seal a letter embossed on fine stationery, spritzing it with her perfume and sending it off to her lover, and there’s something in his expression that catches Yuuri off guard. Something strange, that doesn’t belong there. Something like longing, or… it can’t be sadness, can it?

Then he sighs, the sound so unbearably soft and bittersweet that it breaks something within Yuuri. So fleeting that he isn’t certain Victor is aware he’d even made the sound at all. 

He normally wouldn’t pick his husband up on something like this, but the sheer wistfulness on Victor’s face piques his curiosity. “The letter?”

“Mmm?” Victor’s gaze snaps away from the TV, startled.

“You looked…” Yuuri doesn’t quite know how to end that sentence. “Was it... the letter?” 

“Oh,” Victor laughs sheepishly, almost self-consciously, colour rising to his cheeks. “Yeah. I got a little sentimental for a moment, I think. I just always found the idea so romantic, back when I was younger.”

“Just when you were younger?” Yuuri remembers writing several letters to Victor in his adolescence, all unsent, probably collecting dust in a storage bin back in Hasetsu. He’d never been able to work up the nerve to actually mail out the multi-page documents of fawning admiration for his then-idol… but looking at his husband’s face now, maybe that’s not a bad thing. All the wistfulness has abruptly vanished from his features, replaced with discomfort and something like shame. 

He doesn't answer Yuuri’s question for a long moment, just hums noncommittally and grimaces, brow slightly furrowed, his eyes never leaving the television screen. “Long story. I just… think the idea is better in theory than actual practice.”

_ Oh. _ Yuuri remembers now. There had been letters, a string of them, after Victor’s first Olympics. Anonymous letters, escalating from benignly awkward attempts at romantic flattery to downright terrifying threats, culminating with an unpostmarked and violent manifesto slid directly beneath his apartment door. In the end, the sender had been found and a restraining order drafted, but the whole ordeal had scared Victor enough to retreat from the public eye for a while, prompting him to move apartments and stop receiving fanmail altogether. 

To this day, a decade later, he still has hangups about things being slid under their front door, even routine communications from their building manager or harmless flyers causing him to tense up on first sight. It’s one of the things that Yuuri has gotten used to over the months they’ve lived together, but now, he sees the whole thing in a heartbreaking new light. 

He wants to say more, to ask about this fraught relationship with letters of admiration, but the heroine on screen chooses that moment to _ very nearly _ brush hands with the object of her affection. Victor instantly melts, flopping back against the couch cushions, clutching at his chest and practically squealing with delight. Any thoughts of love letters left in that unfairly beautiful head of his are clearly long gone.

Still, Victor’s wistfulness sticks with Yuuri through the rest of the evening, turning over in his head as they finish the movie, take Makkachin out, brush their teeth and eventually crawl into bed together. 

Long after Victor has fallen asleep nuzzled into Yuuri's chest, his mind races and his heart aches. How cruel is it, how wrong, that the precious man sleeping soundly in his arms has been deprived of the simplest of romantic gestures that he longs for? How unfair that the closest he’s ever received is fanmail or worse, pages and pages worshipping the idea of who he _ should _ be rather than cherishing the amazing person who he really _ is _. 

It breaks Yuuri’s heart and fills him with a steely resolve at the same time. Victor Katsuki-Nikiforov deserves a proper, romantic love letter, and there's only one person in the world who is qualified to write it for him. 

He knows he won't be able to sleep until he puts his plan into action so, careful not to disturb the lightly-snoring man curled sweetly into his chest, he fumbles for his phone on the bedside table and orders the fanciest stationery set he can find, along with an elegant fountain pen and wax seal set. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it properly. 

He schedules the delivery for tomorrow afternoon when he knows Victor will still be at the rink training with Yakov, then sets his phone down. Plan in motion, he finally settles down enough to sleep, dreaming about all the things he wants to say to the man slumbering in his arms. 

~ ~ ~ 

The dreaming is all well and good, but the writing, as it turns out, is a different matter entirely. 

The supplies arrive promptly the following afternoon while Victor is at practice, just as planned. Yuuri brings them all in to the spare room, spreads the rich paper out on the antique writing desk in the corner, sits there with the fountain pen in hand - 

And stares at the blank page. 

And stares.

And stares. 

Where does he _ start _ ? There’s a thousand lifetimes of love in his heart for this man… but how does he even _ begin _ to set those feelings down on the page? He's fluent in two and a half languages at this point, semi-proficient at a handful more, and none of them even come _ close _ to having the words to accurately convey the depths of his love. 

He's never been the best with his words, anyway. Which isn't to say he's not well spoken, only that he finds it easiest to show his heart through dance, movement, _ action _. Imparting his feelings through his body has always been second nature, fluid and freeing and fleeting. But putting them down on a page is so solid, so permanent, and that permanence is daunting. 

There are benefits to that, he knows. He does take some measure of comfort in the tangibility of this project. He can dance his heart out for Victor on the ice, but the tragedy of performance is that it’s over as soon as it begins. Sure, Victor can—and does—watch and rewatch videos of Yuuri baring his soul on the ice, but the replay is never quite the same as the real thing.

This, though, this is something that Victor can hold onto. Something he can keep with him during those awful, lonely times when they are forced to be apart. Something solid and concrete he can come back to over and over again to remind him of Yuuri’s love. 

They miss each other terribly when they’re apart, but Yuuri knows that their separation always hits Victor the hardest. He finds some modicum of comfort in thinking of his husband on those long, lonely nights, the nights when he finds himself unable to sleep in their bed alone and unwilling to wake his far-off sleeping beauty with a text for comfort. He thinks of Victor finding his letter and re-reading it, running his finger over the words that Yuuri has written, and finding the solace and peace that he needs. 

But what words, exactly? How to put his heart on the page, to make finite and solid a love so transcendent and all-consuming? It’s a next to impossible task. 

It had been easy enough when he was a child writing fanmail. Easy, when all he was doing was listing traits he found admirable. Victor’s stunning smile, his pretty hair, his poodle, his jumps, his gold medals and world records. But those letters, waxing poetic about the boy on the posters on his wall, were equivalent to taking a picture of a starry night sky with a camera phone- so pale, so flat and lifeless compared to the breathtaking beauty of the genuine article.

With a sinking feeling, he thinks of those clumsily scrawled letters, full of empty praise and shallow idolization. He thinks of the thousands of others just like his, penned more for the benefit of the writer than the recipient. He thinks of that final letter, slid directly under his Vitya’s door, dripping the writer’s vile and disgusting fantasy like poison onto the page. 

He pictures Victor back then, long-haired and starry-eyed, opening those letters, reading those words, all dehumanizing in their own, vastly different ways. Whether he was an object to be lifted up on a pedestal, or an object to be degraded and used, he was an object just the same. Never a human being, never a _ child _, never loved for who he was, never told what he really needed to hear all those years ago. 

And with that heartwrenching thought, the words come as easy as breathing, as easy as the glide of his blades along the ice’s surface, as easy as loving his Vitya. 

He starts with the words that Victor had needed to hear back then. The words he still needs to hear to this day. The words that Yuuri whispers to him every chance he gets, that he knows, even now, that Victor doesn’t always believe. _ You are strong. You are worthy. You are so, so _ loved _ . _

He writes for the parts of his husband that matter. Not the brilliant smiles he flashes for the cameras, but the small, soft ones he saves just for Yuuri. Not the gorgeous, silken locks that never fall out of place, but the soft strands that stick out adorably when he wakes in the morning. Not the gold around his neck, but the gold on his finger.

A million words spring to his mind, a million different ways he loves his Vitya, and it’s all he can do to keep up with the torrent of sentiment flowing from his heart onto the page. And once Yuuri starts writing, he finds that the hardest part is figuring out how to stop. 

By the time Victor gets home that first day, he already has a page and a half written. After that, nearly everything he does inspires Yuuri to write more. 

He falls asleep on Yuuri's shoulder watching TV that night, and that alone inspires 3 extra pages. He brings him breakfast in bed on their off day “just because”, and Yuuri goes through another 5 the next time Victor is at the rink. 

A few days later, they argue. It’s a rare occurrence, and it doesn’t last very long, but even in the four hours’ frosty silence that precedes a mutual and heartfelt apology, Victor places a steaming cup of tea on the coffee table in front of him and gives him a kiss on the forehead on his way to the bedroom. Yuuri very nearly gives himself carpal tunnel with all the words that that inspires. 

Slow to anger, quick to forgive, patient and generous and loving and kind, even though the world has given him every reason not to be. It’s nothing short of a miracle a man like Victor exists, and Yuuri is blown away because _ what could he ever have done to deserve him? _

After a week of writing, he has to order more stationery. After two and a half, and sixteen pages front and back, he’s still only barely scratched the surface of his affection. But between the ache starting to develop in his wrist and the fact that the stationery set he’s been using is on backorder, he begrudgingly admits that this will have to be enough. 

For now, at least. 

This may have been Victor’s first love letter, he’s decided, but it certainly won’t be his last. 

~ ~ ~

They always check the mail after walking Makkachin on Tuesdays, so Yuuri waits until then to put the final stages of his plan into action. He’ll feign a headache and send Victor off to walk Makkachin alone—he already feels guilty about the deception, but he doesn’t want to ruin the surprise at the last minute—and put the finishing touches on his letter. Then he’ll slip down to the mail room and plant the letter in their box for Victor to find when he returns. 

It’s a lot of subterfuge, he knows, and it would be a lot simpler to just give Victor the letter directly. But it’s better this way. This project was always for his husband’s benefit, and it would feel vaguely self-serving to stand right there and watch him read it. 

Also, if he’s honest with himself, there’s a tiny part of him that’s embarrassed and worried that Victor won’t like the letter, and he’s too much of a coward to risk seeing that firsthand. Even though he knows his husband would sooner swear off skating forever than act anything less than thrilled with a gift from Yuuri, he’s so easy to read that Yuuri just can’t bring himself to be in the room when he sees it. 

No, the best plan is to let Victor find and read the letter on his own, let him react to it however he will outside of Yuuri’s scrutiny, even if it means letting the secret live just a little bit longer. So, as soon as they return home from the rink the following Tuesday, Yuuri puts his plan into action. 

A wrench is thrown into the works almost immediately, of course. The second he mentions a headache, Victor is at his side, brow furrowed, pushing him gently down on the couch and scrambling for a glass of water and some ibuprofen. 

“Are you sure you want me to take her out?” He asks from the bathroom, soft and concerned, rummaging around the medicine cabinet for the painkiller. “I can stay here with you until you feel better.”

Yuuri thinks his heart might burst with affection. Really, what on Earth could he ever have done to deserve this sweet, caring man? “I’ll be fine, Vitya, you go ahead.”

Victor emerges from the bathroom frowning, reluctant. “Are you sure?” 

Yuuri smiles, chest aglow with love. “I’m sure.”

The tender kiss Victor presses to Yuuri’s forehead nearly melts him on the spot, and as he puts Makkachin’s collar on—mostly to fend off snide remarks from Mrs. Kozlova, their crotchety old neighbour who is forever complaining about her being off-leash—and leads her out the front door, Yuuri has to fight the urge to add another dozen pages to his letter. 

But there’s no time for that. The clock is ticking, and he has to move if he wants to get everything finished before his husband returns. As soon as he hears the door latch click shut, he leaps off the couch and gathers his supplies from their hidden box in the guest bedroom, laying all 16 pages out in order on the desk. He spritzes them lightly with his cologne, not so much as to be overwhelming, just enough to delicately imbue the scent to the pages. 

He signs the letter with a flourish of the fountain pen, adding a few hearts around it for good measure. Then he retrieves a tube of lipstick he’d dug out of the bottom of Victor’s old makeup bag. It’s a soft petal-pink, not typically a colour that Yuuri himself would wear, but it’s clearly high-quality and matches the tone and aesthetic of the letter better than the red he would usually go for. He carefully applies it before lifting the final page to his lips and pressing a kiss just below his signature. 

Then he sets the paper down on the desk next to the others and stares at them. 16 pages, front and back, a treatise on his love for the best man he has ever known. It still doesn’t feel like enough—it doesn’t feel like anything will ever be enough to truly do his Vitya justice—but it’s a start. 

He stacks the pages in order, folds them carefully and ever-so-lovingly, and slides them into the envelope, which he seals using the wax set. The wax is gold, of course, the design on the seal an elaborate snowflake. _ Something round and golden, _he smiles to himself. 

Then he remembers how much time he has left to get the letter downstairs before Victor returns, leaps out of his chair and sprints for the door, envelope in hand. The elevator will take too long, he decides, so he opts for the stairs instead, leaping down them two at a time. 

The mailroom is blessedly, mercifully empty when he arrives, with no nosy neighbours around to question his sweaty, flushed self hastily sliding an envelope into his own unit’s box. As soon as the letter is in place he relaxes, allowing himself to lean against the wall of mailboxes. He’ll catch his breath, just for a moment, then head back upstairs and wait to hear from-

“Yuuri?”

_ Shit. _

He stiffens immediately at the sound of his husband’s voice, and curses his face for its guilty flush. 

“Yuuri, what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“I was, uh. I just thought I’d… get the mail?”

“Oh, _ lapochka _,” Victor says. “That’s so sweet of you, but you didn’t have to do that. I was going to pick it up on my way back anyways.” 

Right. Right. He withdraws his hand from the mailbox, holding a stack of letters with Victor’s on top. This was a stupid plan, and now he’ll look even stupider if he rides up with Victor and Makka on the elevator still holding it. At a loss, he takes the love letter out of the pile and shoves it in Victor’s face. 

“Uhh, this one says it’s for you!” 

He can’t bring himself to look his husband in the eye, so he stares at the floor instead, waiting for Victor to pluck the letter from his hand and save him from this agony of awkwardness. He doesn’t, though, and eventually enough seconds pass that a new worry blooms in his chest. He thought Victor would at least read the letter before deciding that he hates it, but what if the mere sight of it has rendered him speechless already, then-

_ Oh _ . Oh, _ shit. _

It only takes a glance at his husband’s face to realize the glaring error he has made. Victor is frozen in place, eyes wide and afraid, and Yuuri is a class-A idiot for not remembering the very event that started this quest in the first place and slipping an unaddressed, unpostmarked envelope directly into their mailbox. If there’s a gold medal for stupidity, he’s surely earned it with this harebrained scheme. 

“Yuuri, where did this-” Victor’s voice is shaking, and Yuuri feels like the world’s biggest asshole for scaring him like this. 

“It’s okay!” He blurts out, panicking. “It’s just… it’s from me?”

“From…” This, at the very least, appears to break Victor out of his state of fear. His blinks and seems to focus his eyes just enough to recognize that, sure enough, his own name on the front of the envelope is written in Yuuri’s handwriting. “Oh.” The relief on his face is instantaneous, and the tight clench of guilt in Yuuri’s heart relaxes along with his husband.

It picks up again soon enough, though, as Victor takes the offered envelope from Yuuri’s hands. 

“If it’s from you, why did you come all the way down here to give it to me?”

“I thought - I was just planning on-” _ On having you pick up an anonymous letter in our mailbox and assume your stalker had found you again because I’m too much of a coward to give it to you myself _. Yeah, that’ll go over well. “Just… can you just read it?” 

He means _ just read it when we get back to our apartment _, or at least on the elevator, but Victor chooses to flip the envelope over and open it right here in the mailroom, leaving Yuuri to stand there and watch just as he’d feared, wishing very much that the ground would open up and swallow him. 

As soon as Victor spots the wax seal, he hesitates, bemused. “This is fancy.”

“Yeah,” Yuuri rasps, his throat completely dry. 

He slides the folded pages from the envelope and the slight, delicate scent of Yuuri’s cologne comes with them. Victor blinks down at them, eyes round and bewildered. 

“Yuuri?” he asks, voice trembling again for a different reason. “Yuuri, what is this?” 

His eyes scan the first few lines and his lips part in a silent inhale. Despite his pounding heart and overwhelming sense of embarrassment, Yuuri can’t help but think that this is even better than watching him watch any romantic movie. By the end of the first paragraph, his cheeks are flushed and his eyes are filled with tears. 

“Yuuri…”

Yuuri can feel his face heating up again, and scratches the back of his neck sheepishly. “You said you’d never really received a love letter before and, well… I thought you should.”

He finally tears his gaze away from the pages to look Yuuri in the eyes, overwhelmed. “You did all of this… for me?”

“Of course I did.” Yuuri says. “You deserve it. You deserve _ more _, it’s just my wrist started to hurt after 16 pages and-”

He’s cut off when Victor flings himself into his arms in an exuberant and crushing embrace, dropping Makkachin’s leash in the process. She doesn’t go anywhere, just sits at their feet wagging her tail as Victor squeezes the air out of Yuuri’s lungs in a joyful, bone-crushing hug. 

“Yuuuuuriiiiii,” he sighs into his shoulder. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, _ thank you _. This is… this is the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“You like it?”

“I _ love _ it,” he says, breathless and beaming, and Yuuri thinks that the glow that smile stokes in his heart could power a thousand suns. “I love _ you _, Yuuri.”

“I love you too, Vitya.”

“Apparently.” Victor chuckles, looking blissfully down at the pages in his hand. “16 pages worth.”

Yuuri shakes his head, pulling his husband in closer and giving him a little kiss on the tip of his nose. “A hundred pages worth,” he corrects. “A thousand. A mil-”

The remark is cut off again, this time by Victor’s lips, which crush into his with a joyful kind of desperation as they melt into each other’s embrace. 

Mrs. Kozlova chooses that minute to walk into the mailroom and find the two of them kissing directly in front of her box, Yuuri’s hands on Victor’s waist, Victor’s arms around Yuuri’s neck, hands still holding the envelope and letter. As if the two young whippersnappers hadn’t inconvenienced her enough already. 

She grumbles something about there being no point in putting a leash on their “silly dog” if they’re not going to hold onto it as she scoots around them to check her mail, but Yuuri finds, for the first time, that he doesn’t really care what the old woman is saying, or what she thinks of them. Now, with his husband blissfully bundled in his arms and a heart full of so much love he feels he might very well lift up off the ground and float away? Now, somehow, he finds, he doesn’t care at all. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Only 5 months late with the weekly prompt this time instead of 6.... we're getting there, folks. 
> 
> A million thanks to the incomparably lovely and wonderful Rina and Aubrey, y'all are the actual literal best. <3
> 
> Come yell at me on [tungle](https://sweet-vitya.tumblr.com/), if you feel so inclined.


End file.
